Describing Words
This tool helps you find adjectives for things that you're trying to describe. Also check out ReverseDictionary.org and RelatedWords.org.
Click words for definitions.
Words to Describe hues
Below is a list of describing words for hues. You can sort the descriptive words by uniqueness or commonness using the button above. Sorry if there's a few unusual suggestions! The algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job for most common nouns. Here's the list of words that can be used to describe hues:
- definite reddish
- rusty olive
- transparent waxen
- mostly purple and blue
- sunburnt, warlike
- ghastly leaden
- midrange orange
- false or morbid
- rosy and vermilion
- once pastel
- limpid emerald
- umber and crimson
- grey, neutral
- pleasing bright
- ashen purple
- dark ideal
- deeper, reddish
- distinct and variegated
- still deeper and brighter
- vibrant, fierce
- manly olive
- quite sober and protective
- swarthy or olive
- beautiful but fleeting
- different gaudy
- yellow and arid
- menacing, coppery
- natural delicate
- sickly livid
- sultry hectic
- less pallid
- wan livid
- more ashen
- more, sweeter
- mexican olive
- arid beautiful
- earthy or greenish
- crimson and lilac
- golden sepia
- watery and silken
- deeper, golden
- blacker and bleaker
- shocking iridescent
- brightest or most effeminate
- deepest ethiopian
- innumerable ever-changing
- green and simple
- far rosier
- misty lilac
- red or auburn
- sombre moral
- grave orange
- green, dismal
- hazy, lurid
- livid death-like
- delicious tawny
- somewhat warmish
- natural dusky
- flaxen or red
- previous dull
- dusky and dingy
- luminous coppery
- awful livid
- pleasing verdant
- unhealthy, reddish
- pleasing greenish
- gorgeous flamboyant
- countless glorious
- decidedly redder
- unpaintable, delicate
- rosier, healthier
- blue, purple and yellowish
- faintest dusky
- fresh and untarnished
- odd, ashen
- blackest and most sombre
- dingy waxen
- softest autumnal
- watery azure
- greenish olive
- evil, orange
- ruddy metallic
- same sun-bleached
- latent but rich
- odd gray-blue
- pleasing azure
- mild, dark-brown
- strange and milky
- odd, crimson
- imaginable metallic
- reddish, bloody
- sallow but hardy
- purple and mellow
- intense mineral
- normal, ruddy
- post-digital
- sickly post-digital
- bluish leaden
- dull flaxen
- agreeable creamy
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Describing Words
The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the "HasProperty" API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books!
Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files - mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.
Hopefully it's more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way - for example, gender is interesting: "woman" versus "man" and "boy" versus "girl". On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, "beautiful" is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world's literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for "woman" - too many to show here).
The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The "uniqueness" sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives' uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it's actually pretty simple). As you'd expect, you can click the "Sort By Usage Frequency" button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.
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